THURSDAY, APRIL 11, 2019 VOL. A-75, NO. 15
SERVING FORT ST. JOHN, B.C. AND SURROUNDING COMMUNITIES
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It was a bright and colourful night at the Lido on Friday, April 5, 2019, as the Energetic Dance Explosion entertained with an evening of Latin American dance numbers. Earlier in the week, lead choreographer Aneudy Grullon (left) said his goal is to expose the Fort St. John community to dance and to give residents the opportunity to learn how. To watch a clip from the show, visit alaskahighwaynews.ca
‘No easy solution’
Caribou plan pitched to skeptical public MATT PREPROST editor@ahnfsj.ca
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A wolf cull and maternity penning program has led to increased birth rates, plummeting death rates, and rising caribou populations in the B.C. South Peace. But more needs to be done to fully help stabilize the southern mountain caribou, including restrictions on industrial development, government officials said at a town hall Tuesday, April 2. Officials with both the B.C. and federal governments were in Fort St. John to give the public an overview of two draft agreements to protect vast tracts of caribou habitat, continue the wolf kill, and grow the successful maternity penning program in the region. “We got here through the way that we’ve managed the landscape, and we’re reaping the rewards of that management on caribou,” said Darcy Peel, director of the province’s caribou recovery program. “There is no easy solution here. That’s the key we want to get out to people, to understand there’s no solution to caribou recovery that you just flick this switch and everything will be good. This requires a lot of action at the front end, and ongoing commitment to recover caribou in order to keep them on the landscape.”
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A resident speaks at a caribou recovery town hall in Fort St. John, April 2, 2019.
Caribou numbers in the central group of the southern mountain caribou herds around Chetwynd and Tumbler Ridge have dropped from between 800 to 1,000 in the 1990s, to around 230 today — a “precipitous decline,” biologist Dale Seip said. While a few herds in the region have already been extirpated, the entire population likely would have been by 2020 without predator control and maternal penning starting five years ago, he said. “We’ve been studying these caribou since 2002,” Seip said, noting a radio collar program has been tracking herd movements, calving and mortality rates, and population counts. The wolf cull has killed 476 wolves since the winter of 2014-
15, Seip said. That’s helped drop caribou mortality rates from 14% to 5%, increased calving rates from 16 per 100 animals to 25 per 100, and increased herd populations by 20%. Those numbers have been buoyed by a successful maternity pen run by West Moberly and Saulteau, where pregnant caribou cows are captured each March and penned through to late July to let the calves grow in a safe environment and give them a better chance at survival. However, fragmented habitat conditions and growing moose populations are seeing wolf numbers bounce back each year, Seip said. “Wolf control works, but it comes with a lot of effort and it needs to be ongoing,” he said.
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Seasonal caribou and wolf habitat generally don’t overlap — caribou use the rugged interior and high elevations of the mountains in summer as their calving range, and move out to the alpine ridges and onto boreal plateaus through the winter. Wolves live exclusively in valley bottoms during the winter, sustained largely by moose. “Caribou are relatively safe as long as a high elevation refuge is in place,” Seip said. But industrial landscape changes over the decades have flipped the tables, Seip said, and made it easier for wolves to climb up into the alpine via roads and corridors in the summer. That’s leading to more caribou deaths — around 40% of total caribou mortality each year. As industrial activity continues, it replaces old mature forest well-suited for caribou, with young forest well-suited for moose, deer, and elk, increasing those ungulate populations, as well as wolves. “We’ve disrupted this natural predator-prey system by having industrial disturbance on the landscape,” Seip said. Which is a key plank of a draft partnership agreement between B.C., Ottawa, and the Saulteau and West Moberly First Nations. See CARIBOU on A4 & A5
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